Avoiding external media is probably helpful

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Avoiding external media like hard drives and USB drives is probably the most helpful.

I was just thinking of the old days 8 years ago when it was pretty common to use USB drives. Now almost everyone is saving to the cloud and it is far better in every way.

It turns out that USB drives aren’t that reliable. They can lose their charge/data over time. However, leaving them plugged in all the time is a problem too because that can wear them out. Not a good way to have reliable data storage on USB drives.

I bought a friend a USB external hard drive years ago because they were using an old USB drive. I explained how external storage can suddenly die and that it was probably cheaper to just move it all online. They did and now I don’t see them use the external hard drives anymore. I stopped using USB drives a long time ago. The last time I used one it had failed and that was just useless to me.

Now what is interesting is that Microsoft is using USB Drives instead of floppy drives to load their OS purchases. I bought Windows 11 Pro for a computer that came with Windows 10 and didn’t qualify for an upgrade. That came on a USB drive. It was super easy to install and I loved not having to burn a disk for it. This shows hold old I am.

Probably in the future, even USB drives for installation won’t be available. There will probably be some technology that ISPS can stream OS as part of the basic internet service. A worldwide PIXIE boot! Yes, this makes me a nerd I know. The days of hardware OS installations are coming to an end.

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Now I have tried many RAID arrays and external hard drives but they are a PITA and for a consumer level just don’t make sense. They aren’t reliable and easy enough to set and forget, so I don’t see a future there. I think once again something more local like ISPs muscling in on cloud SAAS-like storage happening. Perhaps even ISPS has its flavor of white-labeled OS. People don’t care about the OS they care about playing games, getting paid at work and not losing their money/data to scammers.